Piracy. Theft or not?
Reply #207 – 2003-04-14 23:15:01
Note that this statement refers to "Music CDR". Music CDRs are specifically designed to work in stand-alone hifi cd recorders (although, they will also work in a CDRW drive). In the US, normal data CDRs that you use in your computer's CDRW drive (which will not work in a stand-alone cdr recorder) do not have this tax. Well thas is some incredible marketing buzzword only a high paid executive could make think of it... If you read a little about the history of CDR, namely the Orange Book II format, you would already know this. Well, there really is no diference! If a burned CDR does not play in a player, either the player is bad, or the disc does not conform to the standard. Thats it. If you also read the specs, you will know that the reference is the "Cyanine" (Gold with green bottom) Taiyo Yuden discs (yes, specifically TY). It was the first and only manufacturer at the time, and it is the reference, all CDR drives had to work with those, and all blank media disc manufacturers that wished to enter the market had to make media that would work with these drives. Then the market pushed the price race, and many more "brands" appeared, some experimenting with cheaper materials, which could also allow higher speeds. But, the new materials were of lower quality (data discs can tolerate more errors). Also, these new materials that allowed higher speeds also happened to do poorly at the original 1x speed. Of course, everyone were supposed to not use 1x burners anymore... Then they came, the "stand alone audio burners" which, not suprisingly, only burn at 1x. So... where can we find again the TY gold discs? Oops... They "invented" "Audio CDR media" (Which is a rip off) Media tested (again) to work more closely to the original Orange Book II specs, namely, capable of burning at 1x. It is no coincidence that many of the so called "audio discs" are simply TY Golds (in the best of cases, of course). I am not sure if they also added some "pre recorded" part to the "Audio media" for the unit to check or refuse to write in order to actually enforce the existense of this mythical format. I think i read somewhere about defeating such nonsense in the few stand alone CDR "audio" burners that comply with it. Ah yes, i remembered, the stand alone "audio" CDR units are supposed to check for this "pre recorded" area and refuse to use those discs as a source..., hmph. RIAA as always wanting to control what you do. For completeness, the original Orange Book I was a magneto optic disc with caddy (picture a DVD-RAM disc) that could store a full CD, and the drive could also read normal CDs. In the beginning, it was the only way to master, and was very expensive. Orange Book II requires that the discs are readable in all existing players. Orange Book III (CDRW) does not, and that is why your drive has to specifically support CDRW to read it. As a side note, the original DVD does not require support for reading CDR discs, only pressed (alluminium?) is required by the specs. It seems that the red laser won't normally read CDR discs, so provide your unit to either switch to the bigger wave lenght or have a second laser if you wished to give support for CDR. Well most DVD units will support CDR, thankfully, but it was because the manufacturer wanted to. There is also a strange side effect, in that DVD drives could always read CDRW discs, as they look to the red laser kinda like dual layered DVDs